As it was revealed today that former King County Executive Ron Sims, the number two man at HUD since 2009, will leave his post and retire, some sad economic statistics were just released by King County Housing Authority revealing that they received 25,306 applications for its Section 8 Rental Assistance Program during the recent two-week period in which it reopened the waiting list, May 25-June 7. That is more than double the figure they received four years ago, which was 10,728 during the same two-week period in 2007, the last time they reopened their waiting list.
They will place a cap on a random selection of 2,500 applications from which to choose after they finish processing the mailed-in applications by hand in July. Generally the program pays the difference between the rent charged by a housing owner and the assisted household’s rental contribution, which is set at approximately 30-40 percent of the household’s income adjusted for family size and utility costs.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2011 “Out of Reach” report, the average monthly fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in King County is $1,176. Yet the maximum an extremely low-income family (earning 30 percent of the area median income or less) can afford to pay for housing is $622 per month. There are virtually no rental units in the private market in King County that are affordable to these households. The federal government has not significantly expanded the program in over a decade.
Seattle and Renton have their own Housing Authorities. Seattle's situation looks as grim as King County's. This in March from Seattle Housing Authority's website, "According to Seattle Housing Executive Director Tom Tierney, "The number of new people we are able to serve each month is shrinking. In January, just 74 new households were able to move into our housing or receive a voucher. This number has been as high as 200 over the past five years, but is clearly trending downward. Our vacancy rate in public housing is just 0.2 percent, with only 9 units out of 5,194 currently available to rent."
In King County, applicants must be homeless or about to become homeless, live in substandard housing or be spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent. A typical household in KCHA’s program has an average income of $13,000.
In today's press release, Stephen Norman, Executive Director of the King County Housing Authority, stated, “This level of demand spotlights the growing need for housing assistance we are seeing across the region. The gap between wages or fixed benefits such as social security and housing costs has never been greater. The economic downturn, the steady loss of affordable units, and rising rents are placing many households in increasingly desperate circumstances. The majority of these applicants are elderly, disabled, or working poor families with children. Many are on the verge of homelessness.”
Rhonda R. Rosenberg is Director of Communications, King County Housing Authority. She told the West Seattle Herald that because of the weak economy, residents are not vacating their Section 8 rentals as quickly as before while the federal government is not keeping pace financially with the demand.
"They've applied for a chance to get on the waiting list," she said. "The problem is that in the bad economy more vouchers are not being issued by the federal government. The only way someone can get a voucher is if someone else turns their voucher in and it gets recycled to the next family. But because of the recession they are holding on longer. Section 8 tended to be a leg up, to help a family for a couple of years, but now we have seen fewer and fewer people turning in their vouchers."
She explained that the reason they cap the applications to just 2,500 is that "It could take 10 years to get through the entire list, and in 10 years those names would be no good any more. People move and their circumstances change."
